Linked Web Site giving Background
to The Invisible College

In the course of researching this book Robert consulted an old book on
Freemasonry written by William Preston in 1796. This book contained a lot of
fascinating material about the role of Sir Thomas Gresham and the Tudor and
Stuart monarchs in encouraging an interest in science and education.
Unfortunately the book is long out of print and has no index. In order to
facilitate his own research Robert transcribed the book into HTML format to
create a computer searchable file so he could look for the material he needed to
produce The Invisible College.

Having gone to all this trouble it crossed his mind that if he had been
carrying out this project for his students he would have automatically made the
background material he had created available on the web. Why not do it for
interested readers of this history book, he thought? He approached his
publishers with the idea, pointing out that it was something which computer text
books did as a matter of course, and so presented no technical difficulties.
"Why not give any interested readers the whole background text for Preston
in a web based format?" he asked.

His editors at Headline agreed and so the paper
book "The Invisible College’ has been published in conventional form but it contains instructions within it to enable readers to consult the
out-of-print William Preston’s Illustrations of Masonry which Robert had
already transcribed into web format for his own use.

William Preston would surely be greatly impressed to see his detailed history
of Freemasonry and its formation in the new format of the Information Age. His
long ‘s’s have been transformed into a modern font and his copious and
lengthy footnotes are hidden behind click buttons.

Readers of the Invisible College will not have to take on trust the contents
of this long neglected work and its comments on the founders of modern science.

They can now read it for themselves on the Web.

Full details of how to access Preston's Illustrations of Masonry on the Web
are included with The Invisible College.